The Future is Now: Tracking Songbirds

It's pretty amazing how small we can make trackers for wildlife these days. All the miniaturization in technology is enabling researchers to get new insight into the travel patterns of many animals, including tiny songbirds.

The more we learn, the more we can see how environmental changes, airplane traffic patterns and more are affecting the wildlife around us.

Learn more on the BBC!

Site Down for a time

As I discovered while I was trying to update my shop today, my hosting provider is having some hardware/network issues which has caused my site to slow down, and now stop loading completely. I think it was out long enough it might have lost its DNS entry, so it might take some time after they get the servers up and running again for everyone's computers to be able to see my sites again. This affects shop.learnpysanky.com and www.learnpysanky.com, as well as some of the images on this blog.

I'm very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause!

Stoats 'n' Stuff

Dave had a ferret several years ago. Her name was Jessica, and she was the sweetest little thing. If you want an entertaining pet, get a ferret. Unlike kittens, who keep their playfulness while young, but often grow lackadaisical when older (like Baby Boy, who prefers to just roll over and get a belly rub rather than chase a string), ferrets stay just as active and crazy when they're in old age as they were when they were young.

I remember seeing a video of wild cousins of the ferrets sitting together out in the wild, then one of them darting over and giving a young bear (minding his own business eating berries in a field) a bite on the butt! Then the ferrets ran off, chortling and bouncing away like it had been the best joke in the world. That's a ferret mentality for you: fun first, think of the consequences later. The bear was annoyed, but didn't chase them for long. :)

Stoats are also wild cousins of the ferret, and this really cute video shows him gamboling about in a garden in the UK. It's pretty hilarious!

Chickens in Halifax, update

I got an update the other day from the Facebook group set up for people in favor of being able to raise chickens in Halifax. The study done by the city is nearly complete, and they say the study looks like they're going to continue to ban raising chickens locally, which is really unfortunate. Read about the slowly ongoing saga:

chickens-in-city.html
chickens-in-city-update.html
chickens-in-halifax-update.html

If you happen to live in a place that does allow chickens, why not consider raising some? You get a great source of fresh eggs, that have been produced by chickens you raised and feed yourself - talk about quality control! And often, you'll have enough extra eggs to offer to neighbours - building community relations!

Mother Earth News has an article on raising chickens for first timers, check it out for more information. I think it'd be a lot of fun - I would if I could!

Shipping Less Water Around the Globe

A very interesting article on the BBC today about the ripple effect of removing a lot of the extra water from products like clothing detergent - the containers are smaller, which means less plastics to be recycled, shipping costs (and fuel use) are less, and on it goes.

I learned that it's not just me, modern detergents actually do make less foam. But it's on purpose (not a lack of quality, which I was thinking) - it's a water-saving measure, so you don't have to use as much water when rinsing out your clothes.

So, have a read, it's quite interesting!